Web-based concurrent design with product information markup language

Today's manufacturers provide integrated product process development from product design, production and finally to marketing and sales. The whole product life cycle contains lots of data where product data management is crucial for making use of update information to facilitate collaborative product commerce. A product data exchange standard, product information markup language, which is composed a set of well defined XML schema, is introduced to provide a flexible way to encode structured data into a format. In order to response to the rapid change of production environment or market trend, the intelligent operation is embedded in PIML such that it can provide advice for the design engineers to resolve the engineering problem and minimize the ripple effect caused by sudden changes. The intelligent operation is an artificial intelligent problem solving technique, case based reasoning, which retrieves the past most similar case by weighting various problem parameter and then adapts the past solution for the novel problem. A prototype system is developed and is proposed for applying in electroplating industry.